Date of airing: February 25, 1995 (FOX Kids)
This was a pretty straightforward episode and I liked it for that. A new villain and a personal connection to Spider-Man that comes with a backstory, an ongoing thing with Mary Jane Watson who couldn’t sound more like an actress in a porno movie during her phone call with Peter, and a lot of scenes with Peter which did not make me think that SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES is all about Spider-Man only. If there is a lot of Peter Parker in the show, then I will be happy, and this episode had as much Peter Parker as it had Spider-Man, which is the perfect mixture. A lot of Peter means less boom-boom action of the hyperspeed kind where everything explodes in colorful ways, giving me epileptic seizures, and a calmer animated series for kids is always a better-animated series for me.
I liked Mysterio as a villain here, because he could have been the smart antagonist to a smart hero. Tricking the world into believing that Spider-Man can be a bad guy was a great idea, and if the writers had thought about the possibility to have Mysterio be part of a multi-episode arc, “criminal Spider-Man” could have been a thing for an episode or two, having Peter try his best to prove his alter ego’s innocence while also thinking about hanging it up as Spider-Man, because life with the mask is complicated and hard and too stressful (especially with an attractive redhead calling to arrange a romantic evening). But Mysterio needed to show from the get-go that everything seemed to be a ploy, although it seems a bit weird that Mysterio was running the show with his visual hologram effects as good as he did. He must have been in the museum when he had Spider-Man rob the place, which means he must have been captured by the cameras – except of course he was leaving the cubes behind, which means that the cubes were pretty much automated on all fronts, which I cannot believe either, especially since he would have run the entire show by himself. And after SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME, I do not believe for a second that Mysterio can run the entire show by himself. I assume this is kids’ animated show logic that is at play here.
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| Women gotta work out to stay ahead in the New York dating game. |
Still, I liked these 20 minutes, they brought Spider-Man and Peter closer to the reasons for their actions. The origin story for Spider-Man must have been known only to a 1990s television audience who were also comic book readers, otherwise, the writers would not have brought Uncle Ben’s death in the fifth episode of the show and established Spider-Man’s origin story that way. Although who knows, maybe that sequence was produced for the first episode, but cut for time, and ever since then needed to find another episode to be placed in. And every once in a while, the wallcrawler wants to have a life, and for the first time in his superhero career, he asked himself what good the costume brought him. That was quite an interesting character arc for the 30 seconds it was on, and although I never believed that Peter was about to trash the costume “Spider-Man No More”-like, it was nice to see that the writers were penning the script with that story in mind, maybe even having developed the story to go down the “Spider-Man No More” route. Who knows, maybe a future episode of the show actually will see the famous comic arc adapted.
Meanwhile, I was hoping for Terri Lee to be a recurring character, because she seemed interesting here. Poised to catch Spider-Man in the act, but believing nonetheless that the hero was too much of a good guy to be a bad guy in this episode. I would have loved to see Terri and Spider-Man team up to catch Mysterio, but I guess Spider-Man needed to do his thing on his own, without help from the outside, which is a shame. Spider-Man may work alone for obvious reasons, but every once in a while he is allowed to accept a sidekick to help him out, because not unlike Mysterio, he can’t do the world-saving all by himself. That is what the Avengers are there for. Plus, it would prevent the writers to include potential sidekicks for Spider-Man and then have them be kidnapped by the villain of the episode, for Spider-Man to save them again.
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| Spider-Man experiences the magic of movies. |
And finally, there was MJ, who behaved very strangely at the end. It almost sounded like she based her decisions on wanting to hang with Peter or not on how the press handled Spider-Man’s criminal activities. You know, a woman can be mad about the date she missed with the guy she has a crush on, even without the media having to tell her that she can change. MJ being mad at Peter could have been a nice arc for an episode here and there, but apparently, she was too much of a cult character in the comics world to not be Peter’s love interest from the first second until they marry and have a Spider-Boy or a Spiderling. Or a Spider-Girl who will lead her future spin-off show. It was impossible for MJ to just be her own character for a couple of episodes before she becomes a love interest?
